1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computer systems and more particularly to virtual machine systems and suppressing enabled facilities that are not available on an older physical machine being simulated.
2. Description of the Related Art
Typically, software takes advantage of all the new facilities that are enabled on the physical (real) machine for which the software has support. This approach works well when running on a physical machine. One problem with keeping single source code for the latest as well as older physical machines of the same family is that one would have to keep all the physical machines of the same family which the software supports so that the software may be tested on them to make sure the software works on all the physical machines which the software supports. One reason for needing software to support older machines is that not all users may have the latest physical machine. However, it is costly to keep older physical machines just for software compatibility testing.